I wanted to share with you how we hope mentalHEALTH2011 will run. Taking inspiration from a Scott Gould’s work focused on letting attendees become participant, we hope to do some things a little differently.

Our aim is to make mh2011 an attendee-centric event, placing the attendee’s learning as the priority. The conference will not just be a place for ‘experts’ to broadcast information but also a time for attendees, or rather participants to begin in engaging with the content and with each other.

How are we going to do this? One way is that we want to encourage people to start talking to people before the conference. In our minds, the Conference will be the final touch point in a range of touch points leading up to the event. As well as the traditional call for abstracts and the presentation of these, we also want to begin conversations in advance, helping us to ‘crowd-scource’ some of the content. This process should allow us to not only curate content from what people are talking about, but also support the active participation in shaping, forming and most importantly using what all of us, as participants, can contribute.

Please use the comment function below to start these conversations, or indeed your usual social networks. We are using the (twitter) hashtag #mh2011 for the event and we look forward to joining in the conversation.